William wrote: > Where we differ is the division of > responsibilities between speaker and hearer or writer and reader. I think the > responsibility is more or less equal and Cheerskep seems to assume that it's > primarily one-sided, that of the speaker or writer. This presumes that the > passive one, the hearer or reader, has a full storehouse of word meanings on > display as it were and is simply pulling up whichever ones are very clearly > asked for. When Cheerskep says he has no idea what a writer has in mind when > using a particular word, I say he most certainly does have something in mind, > that he too creates a meaning in tandem with the writer although there's no > guarantee that they both have the same meanings in mind.
In other messages, Cheerskep has diminished or discarded the role played by the word or image, the thing in the middle. Danto, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, describes eight indistinguishably identical red square canvases. He proceeds to account for each one (a primed canvas, a symbol of Red Square in Moscow, and six others). The red canvases are the things in the middle--words or images--and his descriptions of them are analogous to the "storehouse of meanings" William refers to. It is extremely important that the word or image, the independent thing in the middle, is tangible and that it can persist relatively unchanged, so that the maker can evoke a notion in the other person's head by using the word or image as his way of aiming. He can say, "This represents my thought, and I formed it in this way to convey my thought to you." The viewer or listener can also point to the thing and say, "When you direct your thought in that way, this is where I wind up." It's like ancient, undeciphered scripts (e.g., Linear A). Archaeologists begin with the assumption that the marks are both intentional and readable in some way. They "contain" a "meaning," which so far has not been discovered. Archaeologists will claim they have deciphered a script when they have been able to ascribe lexical 'meanings' to it (by various methods). Sometimes the archaeologists caution that the translation is tentative, awaiting further amplification or verification. In any event, the translating or deciphering was possible only because the script was preserved generally intact and remained basically unaltered since it was created--not counting erosion, fading, degradation of the substrate, etc. The Thing in the Middle is the fulcrum that adjusts the degree of convergence between what the maker has in mind and what the receiver summons up. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
